Unfortunatelly, the PC-BSD9 doesn't even boot in graphical mode on my laptop (not even in vesa mode).

Anyway, I found some precious informations (see below the link and the announcement). It seems like iXsystems pay an Ucrainian developer to make support for optimus under freeBSD. Can anyone tell me if the support for the nvidia optimus technology will be included in PC-BSD9?

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Konstantin Belousov has been awarded a grant to implement support of GEM, KMS, and DRI for Intel Drivers. This project is being co-sponsored by iXsystems.

The project is to implement GEM, port KMS, and write new DRI drivers for Intel Graphics, including the latest Sandy Bridge generation of integrated graphic units. The work should allow the latest Intel open-source driver to run on FreeBSD, expanding the range of hardware where FreeBSD is suitable for the desktop.

"The Foundation's sponsored project will allow me to spend much more time on this interesting work, and hopefully resolve the big issue for continuing use of FreeBSD on the desktop," said Konstantine.

"Adding support for GEM/KMS will allow both FreeBSD and PC-BSD to run with enhanced native graphic support on forthcoming advanced architectures with integrated, 3d accelerated graphical capabilities," says Matt Olander, Chief Technology Officer at iXsystems, Inc. "FreeBSD has long been dominant in the server market and this is one more step towards making FreeBSD a complete platform for netbooks, laptops, desktops, and servers. We are very pleased to be a part of this project."

Konstantine is a software developer, living in Kiev, Ukraine. He was given a src commit bit in 2006, and since then has spent most of his free time on the OS, making bug fixes and implementing things he considers interesting. He currently is also serving the project as release engineerand core team member.

I am in same situation except that my laptop have an hybrid solution based on ATI Radeon 6630m and Intel Sandy Bridge on chip Intel HD 3000. I am 100% newbie in this PC-BSD environment and don't understand anything so I salute your ideea to make a topic about this problem.
For now I am using Ubuntu and I had to black-list the Radeon drivers in order to have an normal functionality of the laptop, but even so the autonomy of the battery in Windows is 5 hours and in linux almost 2 hours.

Assuming you're using the KDE desktop,,,, your power saver options should be available at start menu/system settings/hardware-power management. There you can change your settings that optimus talks about.
To have your 3d, you have to have your nvidia driver installed and 3d activated. To activate your 3d you would go to start menu/system settings/desktop effects.
PC-BSD really isn't any harder to learn/run than Ubutu or any of the other distro's that do most things graphically. Distro's aren't all cookie cutter so it doesn't matter what distro you choose, you have to learn to do things their way.
You should have a handbook that is left over from the install on your desktop. It explains pretty much everything the average user needs to know. If you need something, look through the PBI directory first to see of it's there.
If not, you have a few choices from there.
1. you can request a PBI be made and normally someone will make it for you.
2. There is a tutorial on how to use a tool to make and create your own PBI in the handbook,,,, I think. Don't recall because I don't use it but it's a safe tool to use and there is a tutorial for it.
3. There is a recent tool that I myself use called pbimaker and it's also in the PBI directory as well as an easy tutorial here in the forum.

Imho,, PC-BSD is the better choice but I'm biased and freely admit it. I like the stability and freedom I'm finding here.

"Perhaps more important for laptop users is that starting with the 256 series, all desktop and notebook drivers will launch in tandem, so you can get the 256 beta for any NVIDIA equipped desktop or laptop—including Optimus laptops—with one small exception. If you have a laptop with switchable graphics (i.e. Alienware M11x and ASUS UL30/50/80Vt to name a few) you'll have to go through your manufacturer for driver updates."

Quick question: the installer will use the nvidia driver or the vesa driver? Please, notice that the vesa driver doesn't work with this video card. A text installer can do the job, but I don't know if the PC-BSD has the possibility to make a textmode installation.

the nv driver doesn't work. The nvidia card is detected as is expected, but this message are shown instead of starting installer in graphical mode:

ERROR: failed to start GUI with detected driver. Trying VESA mode.

And then, the VESA mode doesn't work. It fails.

So, if you can embed the nvidia binary driver, this should work. If you can do that, I can test your snapshot and confirm if this works or not. I think many users have optimus laptops and it would be nice to run PC-BSD on them.